Re: Newbies Guide To Game Development

Posted 13 February 2006 - 11:59 AM

thanks for your comments here's the second part:

Newbie Game Developer's Guide To Game Development [Part 2]

Hello again in this part i'll explain you how to develop games without a budget. You'll only need to pay your electric bill . So first of all in the first part i explained the game engines a little bit. So if you want to be a fast producer you (i think) will need to have an engine. But wait you can build your engines without messing with low level again. So i can hear that you're saying if an engine does the low level part how can i develop an engine that doesn't need to mess with low level APIs!? By using third-party libraries!
Ok. Here's a list of third-party libs i oftenly use:
- GDS (my own 3rd-p. lib, under development _ will be available soon)
- SDL (Sam Lantinga [Blizzard], www.libsdl.org)
- TinyPTC (Gaffer, http://www.gaffer.scene.org/tinyptc)

My suggestion to you is SDL it's the best 3rd-p. lib you can ever find... It does the basics, gives you a nice interface then let's you code. So if you have choosed one of them let's choose the compiler. Again a small list of the free compilers that i use:
- GCC/GPP (MinGW [for Windows], www.mingw.org)
- VC++ 2005 Express edition (Microsoft, http://msdn.microsof...sualc/download)
- LCC (Jacob Navia, www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32)

These are the best... And Code::Blocks seems to me more user-friendly and more powerful than DevC++. Finally after choosing your IDE you're done. See, you got a super-powerful development environment for just $0.00!
That's why i love open-source. So i know this is a short article but i must crop it here before getting into game design.
.Dec1pher

Edit: I'm speaking for C/C++ but if you choose to use any other language like Python just drop me a mail i'm always ready to help...

Re: Newbies Guide To Game Development

Posted 26 February 2006 - 03:30 AM

Sorry everyone i was busy with a j2me mobile demo. Here's the new part:

Newbie Game Developer's Guide To Game Development [Part 3]
The basics of game design:

Well hello from the part three of our series. In this part i will explain some basics of the game design.
But this won't be a codewise part. Maybe some psuedo but no code. In the last part we built a free
game development environment for C/C++ languages. Let's start:

First of all let's cover what means indie?
Indie stands for the short form of independant. An independant game developer develops games that he/she can.
Like if the developer has more knowledge about soccer games so he/she will do it. Because that's what he/she can
do best.

The game design:
First of all you must imagine all of the game types and you must do some brain-storming for algos
[algo stands for algorithm], events and so on. After you create some psuedo in your brain note them
because they're so important for later use. What i have done in 5 minutes is here:
- Platform game - 2D;
- 2D sprites;
- 8 bits;
- Per-pixel collision detection;
- Time based animations;
...
After technical parts there comes the fun stuff, the upper level parts. Like subject, theme, sounds and so on.
What we've done so far is just the general design part. After that there comes sketches, drawings and concept
arts. This time those should be done by a graphician i think because a graphician will give you more quality
stuff than yours [in case you're not a graphician ]. So the best tutorial would be application itself i think.
Let's design a simple shoot'em'up game together;

- Game Type: Shoot'em'up;
- Game Name: Nameless for now;
- Bit Depth: 8 [256 colors];
- What i need:
- Per-object collision detection for spaceships and their bullets;
- A transparent color [magneta is suitable];
- Animation handler;
- Image loaders;
- A game engine;
- AS [Artificial sucker - because no need to make super ultra thinking enemies just shoot while in screen];

- Subject: Our hero [Luke Skytalker] is in a war with Darth Father and he must reach the base before he gets shot;
- Theme: Dark and space related sprites;
- Additional info for sprites: www.panelmonkey.org, www.gsarchives.net;

You see generally it is done! But wait it is generally this was just a start. After all of these geneal stuff
there comes deeper subjects like incentories, power-ups, bullet powers, fire ranges...

...
As you can see this is so simple, you just imagine and play it in your brain then you write it down.
So this means this is the end of this part. I think next part or this part is the end for this series. Because
you now are a basic game developer. After i'll restart my engine series. And then i'll finish by developing a
game and merging everything together. Phew hope these series teaches you something.
.Dec1pher